Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchJean Pfaelzer, "California, a Slave State" (Yale UP, 2023)
Episode 135
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Rus…
3 years, 1 month ago
David Cressy, "Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Episode 42
Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. David Cressy is a work of social history examining community relationships,…
3 years, 1 month ago
The Environmental Unconscious
Episode 121
Steven Swarbrick talks about poetic engagement with nature in the work of early modern poets Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and Joh…
3 years, 1 month ago
Rachel E. Walker, "Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
Episode 660
Between the 1770s and 1860s, people across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. Physiognomy refers to using facial…
3 years, 1 month ago
Simon Dreher and Wolfgang Mueller, "Foreigners in Muscovy: Western Immigrants in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Russia" (Routledge, 2023)
Episode 238
This interview delves into a book that is indebted to the scholarly work with which New Books Network founder, Marshall Poe, began his career: ‘A Peo…
3 years, 1 month ago
Vera Keller, "The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Episode 21
Many accounts of the scientific revolution portray it as a time when scientists disciplined knowledge by first disciplining their own behavior. Accor…
3 years, 1 month ago
Simon Paul Cox, "The Subtle Body: A Genealogy" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Episode 265
How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many…
3 years, 1 month ago
Michael B. Gill, "A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 317
The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A P…
3 years, 1 month ago
Robert Aldrich and Andreas Stucki, "The Colonial World: A History of European Empires, 1780s to the Present" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Episode 1327
The Colonial World: A History of European Empires, 1780s to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Robert Aldrich and Dr. Andreas Stucki provides the …
3 years, 1 month ago
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind, "Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2023)
Episode 185
Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Harvard UP, 2023) is a sweeping intellectual history of the concept of econ…
3 years, 1 month ago